This Corrosion
by notmanos
Summary: (Season 11) Eileen calls Sam and Dean to help when what should be an ordinary demon hunt takes a dramatic and gross turn: the demon is causing rapid destruction of its vessels. What they find is much more than any of them bargained for.
1. Die Down Here

_N.B.: I just wanted to write an Eileen story. She's neat. So here it is._

* * *

 _ **1 - Die Down Here**_

Eileen wondered if demons being total dicks was part of their general evil, or simply a personality defect of most of them. She hadn't hunted down enough to really know.

What was a good demon sample size? Thirty five? Fifty? One hundred? She knew she was trying to distract herself from the job at hand, but it wasn't working. Of course the demon she had hunted down would disappear into the one place she didn't want to go: a strip club. She also didn't understand why Portland had so many strip clubs and fancy doughnut/cupcake shops, but that seemed like a question for another time.

The demon she was trailing - did he know? She didn't think so, but you could never be a hundred percent with some demons - had ducked into a club named Pattycakes, which seemed sexist and infantalizing, and just gross as hell. Eileen had to suck it up and follow, but she was glad she had pulled up her hair inside a baseball cap, and was wearing baggy clothes. If no one looked too hard, she might pass as male. Or male-ish. She found male drag often helped you disappear into a crowd more, because being a woman, no matter where you were, always got you a certain amount of unwanted attention.

The first thing that hit her inside the place was the smell, which was flop sweat, desperation and cheap beer, with an underlying scent she could only really think of as ass. It was dark, but the stages and gyrating, half-naked women were extremely well lit. She could feel the music, which had the regular bass pulse thumping of a contemporary hit of one sort or another. Eileen had no musical preference, but she did kind of like the erratic, jackhammer thumping of some dance music, because the beat was simply insane. What must that sound like? She honestly couldn't imagine it was anything pleasant.

Her quarry, a very average looking white man with a regulation Portland beard, cut through to the back. She was afraid he was heading to a private booth, but it looked like he was headed to the men's room.

Oh god. A men's room in a strip club. There was another layer of gross here. Goddamn it.

After taking a moment to gather her wits and steel herself for the cavalcade of horrors to come, and to give her quarry some space, she followed him back there.

It was cleaner than she was expecting, which was something of a nice surprise. Really, it looked like any men's bathroom anywhere, with tiled walls and plastic mirrors, urinals and stalls. Less graffiti than she expected. Since she didn't see him, she knew he was in a stall.

Eileen had a special mix of holy water and salt she carried with her on demon hunts. It hit them like acid, and usually made them smoke out instantly. It was better than try to trap or exorcise them. Let them get burned, and they flew. Which kicked the can down the road, sure, but it was a quick solution to a problem that could get messier by the second. Demon possession, especially in this day and age, could be a tricky thing to manage. A quick glance told her there were only two people in the bathroom right now: her and her quarry. She couldn't have asked for better.

Hoping he really wasn't using the toilet, she kicked open the stall door, holy salt water in a flask in her hand, ready to fly -

\- and what she saw stunned her to stillness. It actually took her a moment to comprehend what she was looking at, and then accept it as reality. From the shins down, he was human. From everything else up, he was ... what the fuck was he? He was a pile of roughly human sized bubbling black sludge, that smelled like rotted flesh and shit, and was collapsing and puddling on the floor around the toilet in a display as gross as it was improbable.

What the motherfucking fuck was going on?

* * *

Sam wondered how long he was going to let this go.

He knew Dean was in his room, brooding, drinking, listening to music, because they were fresh out of ideas about how to handle the Darkness - for now - and Cas hadn't gotten back to him, and Dean was just doing the Dean thing, which meant swallowing all the pain, and trying to drink enough to keep it all down.

Sam wished he could do that. He wished because last night, when he tried to get some sleep, he had a nightmare about being back in the cage with Lucifer again. Now he was up, and he'd be fucked if he was ever sleeping again without being medicated. What awesome shape they were in. They were both traumatized and reeling and feeling especially hopeless. Not new for them, really, but usually he and Dean gotten bitten by the despair bug at different times. Not the same time. Which was unfortunate.

Dean knew where to get stimulants, didn't he? He remembered the mystery pills he'd sometimes find in Dean's coat pockets, or hidden inside his pillowcase when they were teenagers. No matter what town they'd just moved into, give Dean ten hours, and he'd know where the hot make out spot was, and who had the hook up. It was like his superpower was finding trouble. He was a human divining rod for vices.

Sam wondered if Dad ever knew. He didn't seem to. He didn't like Dean getting wasted, told him drugs would not be tolerated, all that. It was Dean's secret rebellion that he had pain pills or uppers, or hung out with the stoners after school and took a few hits. Bobby knew ... didn't he? He didn't like Dean stealing beers when he was too young to drink, but he still let him do it from time to time. He also advised Dean to give drugs a pass, but he had to have known. Bobby liked to classify himself as an "old drunk", but he used that as his shield more than anything. He saw more than he usually let on, and his constant cold war with their Dad was proof of that if nothing else. But Bobby let Dean have it, as long as he didn't obviously bring it home, or get too fucked up to function. Bobby seemed to understand that in a hunter's life, sometimes you needed chemicals to get through the day. Year. Decade if you're lucky and were still relatively sane.

He shouldn't have thought of this. Now he was even sadder than before, thinking about Bobby. Sam was about a minute from barging down the hall to Dean's room to ask if he had any trucker speed that would keep him awake for the next twenty hours when he got an alert on his laptop.

He clicked the window, and was pleasantly surprised to see Eileen's face. "Hey Eileen," he said, signing a hello. It lifted his spirits a little just to see her. She looked pale, and the lighting where she was was stark. It also looked like there was a mirror behind her. Was she in a bathroom?

"Hi Sam. Okay, have you ever heard of a demon who decays his vessel?"

Sam wasn't sure he heard her correctly, but he must have. He wasn't that tired yet. "What do you mean decays his vessel?"

"I've been hunting this demon in Portland, and I just followed him into a bathroom. And I found him like this." She turned her phone around, and Sam wasn't sure what he was looking at at first, and then when he was sure, he couldn't believe it. Was it the lighting again? Because it looked for all the world like a body had decayed to putrescence sitting on a toilet. It was a big mound of black pudding, oozing onto the floor. It looked like its feet and calves were still intact, but those were slowly being consumed by the black ooze ... or joining it. It was hard to say. It was extremely gross, whatever it was.

Eileen swung the camera on the phone back to her. "Two minutes ago, tops, he walked in here, a normal human."

"How?" Sam exclaimed. That wasn't possible. "Was he hit with a biological weapon or something? A spell?" He almost added alien, because wasn't that a thing in one of those junky horror movies Dean watched? An oozing thing that came to Earth and turned people into gooey globs of things? Or maybe he was confusing a couple different movies. He'd have to ask Dean. Or not. Honestly, seeing them once had been bad enough.

She gave an exaggerated shrug. "I've been tailing him for the last half hour. I saw nothing suspicious. I was hoping you could tell me you've encountered this before."

"Not at all." In fact, if he ever had, he might have tried to bleach it out of his brain. Did it smell as bad as it looked? To be honest, Sam didn't want to know. His imagination was making it bad enough. "Which Portland are you in? Oregon, Maine ..?"

She grimaced. "Would telling you I'm in a strip club help?"

He nodded. That would explain the music he thought he could hear faintly in the background. "Oregon." Why were there so many strip clubs?

"Yep."

"Mind if we swing by?"

She shrugged. "As long as you don't cramp my style." She smiled, and it made Sam smile.

"We'll do our best not to. See you soon."

On the one hand, Sam very much did not want to encounter a demon that turned people into pools of black pudding. What the fuck was that about, and also, why? He'd heard of burning out vessels before, but that wasn't burning; that was melting. Again, spell jumped to mind, but that would be a hell of a spell, and any witch that could throw that needed to be taken off the market immediately.

Sam told himself it was a case that needed solving, and not simply an excuse to see Eileen again. Although it was that too. Besides, it would probably take their minds off despair if they were doing something, and a job this instantly perplexing and freaky was a rare thing.

Another thing? After seeing that melted pile of person, he didn't need uppers to keep him awake. Sam wasn't sure he'd ever sleep again.


	2. Remember Us Better Than We Are

_**2 - Remember Us Better Than We Are**_

"And you didn't think to screencap this?" Dean asked.

"Dude, I've already told you, it was gross" Sam said, for the third time. "What part of disgusting black pile of puke are you not getting here?"

Dean shrugged, eyes on the road. At least he was bright eyed and sober looking. Was he sober? Sam was pretty sure he was. The case had brightened him up considerably, especially when Sam gave him the grisly details. There was nothing like a new gross thing to make Dean feel personally invested.

They ended up driving all night. Sam somehow fell asleep at one point and a nightmare about Lucifer woke him up, again. This time it was really weird. He was claiming to be out of the cage, and thanking him for getting him out. Sam was glad to be awake again. Maybe there was a bright side in that he didn't dream about that huge pile of black slime, although Sam would have been cool with it if Lucifer became that pile of black pudding.

Since he didn't want to talk about it with Dean, they ended up swapping positions at the next gas station, with Sam driving and Dean getting some sleep in the passenger seat. He knew Dean sometimes had hellacious nightmares, but sometimes he didn't, and he didn't seem to this time, so Sam was jealous as hell.

Eileen texted him where she was staying, so they went straight to the Pine Ridge Motel when they hit Portland, which was nowhere near a pine ridge or any pines at all, but that was how these things usually went.

They arrived with coffee, because Sam and Dean both needed some, and it seemed like the nice thing to do. Eileen looked like she hadn't slept much herself. She had dark circles under her eyes, and looked a little pale. But if she'd been in Portland a while, that would explain it too.

She showed him what she had, which was all circumstantial, but damning all the same. There had been no police reports on people turning into piles of slime or whatever, but in the past month, there had been a noticeable up tick in missing persons reports. Eileen was of the opinion that, when people found these piles, they didn't think it used to be anything human, but a gross pile of something, therefore never made the connection between the stuff and the missing people. Which made perfect sense. No one would look at one of those piles and think that used to be a human.

Sam had done a cursory search of the Men of Letters' files, and had yet to find anything on a demon that dissolved its hosts. But the problem was there were lots of files to go through, and he might be using the wrong synonym - dissolve, melt, decay or Dean's suggestion "goo-ify". Sam promised if goo-ify ever came up, he'd pay him twenty dollars, which seemed like the safest bet he ever made.

Eileen lost the demon last night after it nuked - oh, there was another synonym to check - its vessel, but she was reasonably certain it was within the same ten mile geographic area, because that seemed to be where it was constantly returning to. Clearly, it was looking for something, but she wasn't sure what.

It was something to go on. Barely anything, sure, but they'd investigated cases with less. Eileen had identified last night's victim, a man named Tuck Sweeney - Dean's interjection of "Since when is Tuck an actual name for a person?" was roundly ignored, although Sam had to grudgingly admit he had a point - and they settled on a course of action. Sam and Dean would do their FBI agents thing, see if they could dig up anything on the victim. Sam was hoping for maybe a general time frame of when he was possessed, which might give them some idea how long vessels could last before they melted, and Eileen was going back to a grid search of the ten mile area, in hopes of finding the demon again. They planned to get back together and compare notes as soon as possible.

When they left, to rent their own room and change into FBI drag, Dean actually signed a goodbye to Eileen, who looked just as surprised as Sam felt. Once outside, Sam had to ask, "When did you learn any sign language?"

"It's called YouTube, buddy, look it up."

Sam shook his head, not willing to admit that's where he looked some up as well after meeting Eileen. He was afraid his sign language was really rusty. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Dean giving him this weird grin. "What?"

"You like her."

"Yeah, she's a good person."

"Nope. You _like_ her."

Sam sighed and rolled his eyes. Yes, of course he did. It was hard not to like Eileen. In both ways you could take the meaning. "Are you ten? Is that where we are now?"

Dean bumped Sam's shoulder with his own. "C'mon, it's been ages since you liked anyone. I was afraid you were packing that up for the old age home or something."

"Why would I ... you know what? No. I'm not having this discussion with you."

"You ever want me to leave, just give me the high sign."

"Sometimes I really want to punch you."

"Go for it. But I'm punching you back."

Which was exactly why Sam didn't do it. They got beaten up enough by demons, monsters, witches, angels. Beating themselves up seemed both self-defeating and redundant.

Dean let it go for now - a small miracle - and they shifted into fake FBI mode. They generally parked a little bit away from wherever they were going, because the car was the weak point in the con. They were certainly old enough now to pass for agents, and they had the fake FBI patter down to a science, but no agent would be driving an old Impala. Dean knew this, but Sam also knew Dean was never giving up the car. Which was fair. It almost seemed like part of the group now.

Sweeney had lived in a small apartment on the eastern side of Portland, within the ten mile search area. The place looked like it had seen better decades, but Sam was willing to bet the rent was outrageous, since Portland and Seattle had joined Los Angeles in being a city that most of its workers couldn't afford to live in. New York had cornered that market years ago on the East Coast, but now most major cities were that way. It was kind of depressing.

The landlady barely looked at their badges or them. She seemed to be in a hurry for something that required her packing a whole load of empty mason jars into a box while they were trying to interview her. To say she was less than helpful seemed like an overstatement. She couldn't tell them anything about Sweeney, except he paid his rent on time and was pretty quiet. She all but threw the keys to his apartment to them on her way out the door. Dean said, before she left, "We think he was dissolved by a demon." And she didn't react at all, proving she hadn't been listening to them. She never even asked why the FBI were looking into a guy who'd been missing for less than twenty four hours. Sam had a cover story ready to deploy and everything. Oh well. He could save it for the next case.

Sweeney's apartment was on the second floor, and it was generous to call the place an apartment. Essentially it was a studio, with a bathroom off to one side, and the rest of the room split up into parts with very loosely defined boundaries. For instance, the area off to the side where tile took over for carpet could, in theory, be called a kitchen, and the carpeted area could be a kind of living room/bedroom set up. "How long has he been living here?" Dean asked, looking around in a kind of disbelief.

Sam checked his notes, because he was sure he was having the same doubts as Dean. "A year."

He shook his head. "What the fuck? Did he not believe in personal possessions or something?"

Yes, it was a studio. But he had an old futon, a microwave, a coffee table, and a lamp. That was were a couple of cardboard boxes by the window, and a quick search of them turned up some books, and a few odds and ends, but not a lot that told them anything about him.

Dean searched the bathroom - which was so tiny it didn't even have a bathtub, just a shower stall - while Sam searched the one closet. Sweeney seemed to have a great love of jeans and sweatpants, and put his dirty laundry in a plastic bag, but that was all Sam could tell you about him. Maybe he was hard up for cash and had sold a lot of his things? But Sam wasn't sure the answer was so simple. There were no photos, nothing that would scream item with sentimental attachment, nothing that gave a single clue to who he actually was.

In desperation, Sam checked the small kitchen area. He'd left a bowl in the sink, and a spoon. He had very few plates or bowls in the cupboard. God, this was making him sad. Sweeney had died as he lived - unnoticed by anyone.

"Okay, well, he wasn't completely Zen," Dean said, tossing him a prescription bottle.

Sam caught it and saw it was a prescription for amoxicillin prescribed three months ago. At his quizzical look, Dean said, "Open it."

He did, and discovered the pills weren't amoxicillin. It looked like oxycontin and Ambien, and something Sam couldn't identify. It looked like a purple gel capsule. "What's this?" Sam asked, figuring Dean was the pill expert here.

He shrugged. "That's a new one on me."

Was it a clue, or just a new club drug they didn't know? Sam figured it was worth keeping until they could figure it out. He put all the pills back in the bottle and dropped it into his pocket.

Sam kind of hated to go back to Eileen and tell them they'd come up snake eyes, but it looked like they had no choice. Damn it.

* * *

At first, Dean ignored it.

He was happy Sam wasn't completely dead inside, and had a thing for Eileen. And why not? She was cute. Dean also suspected it was mutual. They totally needed to go for it, because they would be adorable together. But, again, he couldn't say that, because he knew how Sam would react.

But as soon as they stepped into Sweeney's tragically empty apartment, he realized he had this weird itch in the back of his mind was getting worse. It was only in the bathroom, going through Sweeney's medicine cabinet, that Dean finally remembered what it was.

He didn't have a lot of memories of his time as a demon. Probably because the demon was actually a separate entity from him, and repression was a hell of a thing. Dean felt he could medal in that every year if it was a competition. But he did get flashes sometimes, memories that would rise up and spit themselves out like accusations. Boy, he and Crowley really got up to some sketchy shit.

But what he remembered right now might be helpful. He wasn't sure how to bring it up though. Sam was going to have questions. How many did he want to answer? Fuck it. They had nothing. He might as well bite the bullet.

As soon as they were back in the car, Dean said, "I think I know of a place we might go for answers. I mean, maybe. Sort of depends."

Sam was staring at him warily. He was picking up Dean's hesitation. "Where?"

"There's a ... demon bar about a mile from here." Dean pointed down the street in its direction. Wow, why did he remember it? It wasn't even that memorable.

"A demon bar?"

"Yeah. In the bigger cities, demons often have secret gathering places."

Now Sam's stare was full bore. If he was still psychic boy, Dean would have considered it full Scanners. "Okay. Number one, why are you only mentioning this now? Number two, how do you know that?" Before he had to admit it, Sam figured it out. "Oh my god. Were you there with Crowley?"

"Once," he admitted. He was pretty sure the Portland bar was only that one time. The Seattle bar was way better.

Sam rubbed his eyes, in a way that meant he was trying not to lose his temper. "You could have mentioned this at any time ..."

"I just remembered it, I swear. It was this neighborhood that triggered it."

Sam looked around, like this block of apartment buildings and small, artisan shops going to seed was all that memorable. You could never tell what was going to trigger a flashback, but somehow this did. Dean had a flash of climbing a stripper pole, and was suddenly mortified. He didn't, did he? He then remembered Crowley throwing dollar bills at him. Oh goddamn it. "Are there a lot of demons in this neighborhood?"

"No. They're generally smart enough not to shit where they eat. A high concentration of demons would bring hunters running. So they space themselves out, and try to avoid living next door to the bars."

Sam sighed, nodding. "Makes sense. Well, let's give it a try. Do you think they'll let you in, or try to kill you on sight?"

Dean considered that a moment. "Get ready to fight." He also wasn't completely sure, but was that bar that he and Crowley trashed? Or was it the one in Chicago? And then there was that one they set on fire ... If karma was a real thing, Dean was so fucked, it wasn't even funny.

Demon bars usually camouflaged themselves pretty well, another layer of protection to both keep hunters away, and to keep unsuspecting humans from wandering in. While a nice off the menu snack was never discouraged, even demons had an extremely low tolerance for drunken frat bros. This bar was hidden within what looked like a condemned, shuttered building, that had the old bones of a fast food restaurant. If you went inside, you'd find dusty booths and the long dead bones of mice. But the bar wasn't technically inside. It was under.

Dean concentrated on the memory, pulling it up despite his natural reluctance to do so. You had to draw a special sigil in blood on the wall five paces to the right of the chained up Dumpster. Normally, you needed possessed Human blood to gain entrance, but Crowley had dropped a fun fact on him. Because Dean had been to Hell, there were traces in his blood, and it would be read the same. Crowley had been joking about how human Dean had a "get into the demon underground free" in his pocket all those years and never knew it. Well, he knew it now.

Dean poked the tip of his index finger with a knife, and drew the sigil on the wall, Sam standing by with Ruby's knife and holy water out and ready. It was unlikely they'd attack him immediately, but once they were in the door, all bets were off.

The sigil disappeared into the white painted wall, absorbed, and suddenly a door surfaced, as if rising up from beneath the anti-graffiti paint. It was a cool effect, if a little mind boggling.

He turned the knob and went inside a narrow, dark staircase, that led down to the bar in the technically nonexistent basement of the old fast food joint. It smelled like sulfur and beer, which made sense, but the quiet instantly struck Dean as eerie, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Oh this wasn't good. His hand went to the gun in his pocket.

By the time he hit the bottom of the staircase, he realized there was another terrible smell in here. It was decayed flesh and shit, the smell of death. It was a small space, dark wood and low lighting, your regular dive bar and while this wouldn't be its busy time, there would still be demons in here. Normally.

It was completely empty. There wasn't even a bartender.

"Is it usually like this?" Sam asked.

"Not at all." Dean thought he saw something in the shadows lurking beneath one of the small tables that made up the bulk of the bar, and snapped on a flashlight for a look.

It was a puddle of black goo, spread out from the base of a chair to the outside edge of the table. Dean quickly started looking under all the tables, and found another puddle of goo near the back.

Sam looked over the bar, and said, "There's one here too."

"So it paid a visit already," Dean said, taking a quick peak into the storage room. Just boxes of booze there, not even the good stuff. No piles of goop, though.

Sam had put the knife and holy water away, and was standing in the middle of the bar, looking tense. Dean didn't blame him in the least. "Okay, so, that demon wouldn't have tried to possess already possessed vessels, would it?"

Dean had been trying to consider options, but honestly, there was only one that made sense. "This dissolving thing, it's not a side effect. It's its power. This is what it does to people."

Oh man. This somehow just got a thousand times worse.


	3. Ride The Wild Haze

When they met up with Eileen at a coffee shop - because they still had those on seemingly every block - Sam was glad they had something to tell her. It was a shame it was nothing good.

Okay, so they were dealing with a demon who seemed to have instant decaying power. Why couldn't demons with abilities have lame powers? It was always telekinesis or something. Now one with an instant decay/death touch. It made Sam think about how, when he got his psychic powers from Azazel's blood, he always felt like he had the lamest one. Death visions? Ugh. He couldn't mind control, he couldn't move objects, and it felt like he was the weakest of the lot. But in retrospect, he was glad. He couldn't even imagine the damage he could have done if he was that powerful. The damage he did do was bad enough.

Eileen hadn't covered as much of the grid as she wanted, but she hadn't found it yet. Of course, now that they knew it had decay powers, they were probably going to have to approach the search for it more carefully. Was it a mental power, or touched based? They didn't know. Touch was the most likely, but they had to be sure.

Dean left the table for a while, and Sam assumed it was to get another coffee, as he had gulped his down like he desperately needed a caffeine fix. He thought maybe this was also his overt way of leaving Sam and Eileen alone, but when he glanced around, he found Dean in conversation with the blue haired male barista, and they seemed to be getting on spectacularly. It was probably a good thing they'd changed out of their FBI suits, as he couldn't imagine the guy would be so open with someone who looked like a Fed. Dean wasn't afraid to turn on the charm if it got him something, and that looked like what was going on.

Eileen must have noticed him looking, because she asked, "Does your brother flirt with everything with a pulse?"

Sam almost said that was how Sam imagined Dean found friends in Hell and Purgatory, but realized she was probably better off not knowing their complete histories. If she thought they were fucked up now ... "It seems that way, yeah."

"That must have been hell when you were kids."

Sam thought about that a moment. All the times they moved, from one town to another, sometimes after monsters had attacked them, sometimes with Dad. There were moments here and there where it wasn't so bad, but he associated those moments more with Dean and Bobby than their actual Dad. In retrospect he could see clearly which he couldn't then - Dad spent a shitload of time trying to cure Sam. He never said, but Sam had put the pieces together, with some help from Dean, who had some pieces of information Sam didn't have at the time. Sam thought he was an obsessed, revenge fueled asshole, and he was, but Sam had thought his obsession was with their dead mother and the yellow eyed demon. He'd had the wrong pair - it was Sam and the yellow eyed demon. But he didn't know, and by the time he figured it out, Dad was long dead. It cast some things in a new light, including the unreasonable pressure Dad put on Dean, but it didn't excuse everything. "It had its moments," Sam said.

He went back to search for demons with decaying powers on his laptop, mildly distracted with thoughts of the past, when Eileen asked, "Can we kill this thing like a normal demon?"

Wow. That was a good question. "I would think so. But some powerful demons can be more difficult than they should be." Which begged the question how powerful this thing was. It had to be somewhere on the scale between Crowley and your average demon, but where it fell on that spectrum could be crucial. Ruby's knife or an angel blade should take it out regardless, but could you get that close without getting the decay touch, or whatever it was? And if it did tag you, would the effect die with it? Or would you continue to decay after it was dead? Sam had so many questions.

Dean returned to the table with a new coffee and a fresh croissant, and Sam wondered if he paid for either. "Okay there's a place we should hit tonight. Wonderland."

Eileen cocked her head. "The nightclub?"

Dean nodded, and had to swallow his mouthful of pastry before continuing. "Stefan was telling me that it's pretty much _the_ night spot, and that along with artisanal cocktails, you could pick up some artisanal drugs, if you know the right people. He's gonna introduce me to one of them."

Sam shook his head. Did he say ten hours? Dean had honed his vice seeking skills razor sharp now. But after a moment, Sam realized it wasn't personal. "You're thinking of that purple pill we found at Tuck's place."

He nodded. "It may be unrelated, but we might as well find out." Suddenly, Dean realized that Sam had initially thought he meant something else. "What, you thought I was doing this for me?"

Eileen looked between them, trying not to smile. At least she found them entertaining.

* * *

She had never understood the appeal of nightclubs.

What were they for exactly? Drinking, meeting people, dancing? Couldn't you do that at most bars too? So what made nightclubs special? It almost felt like a logic puzzle, and while Eileen generally liked those, she didn't like this one.

At least Sam looked as thrilled as she felt about going there. Not Dean, though. He seemed up for it. He would though, wouldn't he? He was the D & D player who went for a higher charisma number, while Sam went for a higher intelligence number. Sam would totally be a druid. She figured Dean would go paladin. She'd be a ranger, every time. And it was sad she devoted even a minute thinking about this.

It was better than thinking about an unknown demon who could literally melt people. She and Sam had narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities, but none were great. Demons of plague and ruin, who were definitely stronger than your average bears. Eileen was sure that at least part of the key to defeating him was finding out what the hell - no pun intended - he was looking for. It couldn't have been good.

They all went together, and while Dean couldn't have looked happier if he had a tail to wag, Sam looked like he was gritting his teeth and bearing it. She shouldn't have found the interaction between the two entertaining, but she did. Sibling relationships were kind of fascinating to her, because she was an only child. And sometimes she was in homes with a sort of forced sibling situation with other kids, but it wasn't the same. She rarely got a chance to study the sibling dynamic close up, and Sam and Dean seemed to be a stark case. The more outgoing older brother, the more reserved younger brother, and yet, they had as many similarities as differences. They were both pretty too, although in completely different ways, and Dean seemed to know it more than Sam. Dean also used it to his advantage, but, you know, good on him. You got dealt a certain hand of cards, and you had to play them as best as you could. Dean was clearly used to playing every hand to win. Sam fought so hard not to fight all the time, he kind of exhausted himself, which made her want to give him a hug. She got it. She was probably stuck between the two, hunter wise. It was exhausting to fight all the time, and yet, when she didn't, she annoyed herself. There had to be a happy medium, but if the Winchesters hadn't figured out what it was, what hope did she have of doing it?

They deliberately didn't dress up for the nightclub, which meant they were dressed perfectly for the nightclub. It was one of those things that probably wouldn't make sense in a place other than Portland, but hiking boots and flannel worked in every setting, for almost every reason. The one place the Winchesters stood out like a sore thumb was the lack of beards. Everybody had a beard here. Eileen was tempted to buy a fake one and wear it around, but she was willing to bet it wouldn't draw that much attention. That was one of the best things about this place. Weirdness was expected, and didn't draw that much negative notice. Everyone seemed to be constantly trying to one up each other in the strange sweepstakes. Which also made it an ideal hiding place for a demon with a weird power. Double edge sword.

Eileen knew there'd be lots of glammed up women, and if she really wanted to fit in she'd try and do that, but just the thought of that exhausted her. Besides, from what she heard, Wonderland was one of those "mixed space" clubs, in that it wasn't segregated between gay and straight. It was a club, and you could be whatever, and others would have to live with it or leave. She felt she had a natural butch streak in her, and could play it up if she had to, just like she was sure Dean could probably play up heteroflexible if he had to. And although she was sure if she suggested it he'd completely deny it, she was willing to bet a hundred bucks she absolutely didn't have that Dean had done it before. You couldn't have the advance level flirting skills he had without running the board.

Inside, Wonderland looked like a slightly gussied up bar. Exposed brick and polished wood were set off against multicolored fairy lights, and slivers of mirrors that bounced light across the space like it was a trick. She coud feel music coming up through the floor, but the beat was more subdued, somnambulistic, and she had no idea how anyone could dance to it. Right now, no one was trying.

It was fairly crowded, though, more than she would have suspected. While she and Sam stuck to nonalcoholic drinks, Dean went ahead and ordered the night's signature cocktail, something called the Be Quick or Be Dead, which sounded like it had enough alcohol in it to strip paint off a house. It had three layered colors in it, like the magic trick that was this place's aesthetic. Dean really seemed to like it, and eventually retreated to a corner table, where blue haired Stefan was sitting with a couple of friends.

Eileen looked on, reading lips as best she could from this angle and distance. Stefan seemed to be complimenting Alex as a real chemical wizard, and Eileen had to figure out if he was referring to the man or the woman that was at the table with them. Hard to say, as they both could have been an Alex, and neither looked like they could have been a suburban Portland version of Walter White. Dean was telling this made up story about a purple pill a friend gave him a few days ago, and he was saying it so casually, it was easy to believe. An expert level flirt had to be an expert level liar, and he was nailing it. Also, he'd probably experienced enough real life debauchery, this was a light reworking of an actual event.

Sam knew what she was doing, and asked for an update, and she asked him if Dean was a big partier. His laugh told her the answer was a big fuck yes. At least her personality assessments were panning out.

It was then she felt a change in the music tempo, and the overhead lights shaded to a grape like purple that made the shadows look like bruises. People started filtering out to the dance floor, and her view became more compromised. From what she could tell before her view was completely aced out, Dean was working on a purchase.

"Should he be buying drugs?" Eileen wondered. The likelihood that this lead would pan out was low.

Sam shook his head, looking weary, his shoulders sagging. He'd been hoping he wouldn't, but also expecting he would. "No. Should I go break it up?"

Eileen shook her head. It probably didn't matter, and maybe that was his way of keeping sane; she didn't feel like she could judge. Supposedly Dean had been in Hell for a while. She had no idea how he wasn't completely catatonic.

It was also kind of nice to just sit with Sam. He could be still and quiet, which she appreciated. Not everyone could be, and she knew some people who went out of their way to be noisy and busy when they found out she was deaf. Like volume, either audio or visual, made any difference. If anything, it pissed her off. Didn't people notice how weird and patronizing that was? Of course, that was a stupid question, because she already knew that no, they didn't.

The bass changed tempo again, becoming a slightly more mechanical _thump-thump-thump_ , and the deal must have been done, because Eileen noticed the male and female friends of Stefan, the possible Alexes, were up and leaving, weaving through the mostly uncoordinated dancers. They were almost out of the throng when a man trying to take a shortcut almost slammed into the woman. While he stopped short, his drink went flying.

Eileen saw her lips move, but couldn't quite read what she said. It was something in Latin, wasn't it? And she made a flicking gesture with her finger. The drink seemed to hit an invisible barrier and rebounded, to splash on the guy who was carrying it.

Shit.

She grabbed Sam's arm, and pointed to the woman as she and her male friend were leaving. "She's a witch. I just saw her throw a spell."

"Shit," Sam exclaimed, bolting up and diving through the crowd, probably to tell Dean not to take a goddamn thing she gave him. Who the hell knew what was actually in it.

Eileen decided to follow the witch, see where she lived. A later visit was probably in order, when they were prepared to take on a witch of unknown abilities.

By the time she was outside, the pair of them were so far down the street that Eileen hardly needed to deploy any stealth. They'd never think she was following them.

Of course, maybe this was just a coincidence. Drug dealing witch, who may have sold drugs to the last victim of the decay demon was suspicious, sure, but was it enough? Portland was a big city. It might have been a simple overlap of preternatural things. Except trusting coincidences was kind of a fool's game.

She texted Sam where she was, figuring they could join her if Dean hadn't been turned into a toad or something. Which made for an amusing mental picture if nothing else.

The pair, who seemed oblivious to her, were heading downtown, into a pretty sketchy area. Even though she was a hunter, and had been fighting most of her life, and was currently armed, she felt a natural wariness. Being a woman in the world was dangerous enough on its own, even before you added monsters to the equation.

She'd just texted Sam an address update when all hell broke loose.

A woman appeared in the street before the couple, and Eileen noticed her instantly because she couldn't have looked more out of place. She looked like a suburban soccer mom, Gwyneth Paltrow thin, and wearing a very sensible and surely ridiculously expensive demur blouse and skirt combo. She shouted something, pointing at the drug dealers, and the man went flying, slamming into a parked car so hard the body of it seemed to collapse around and envelop him. Its lights started flashing as a belated and pointless car alarm went off.

The woman had held her ground, behind a shield of very faint green energy, and Eileen ducked behind a car, but kept her camera phone focused on the action. If there were any words exchanged, she'd have to catch them on the replay. But drug dealer girl threw a spell of her own, one that pushed soccer mom back several feet, as if she was trying to walk into a hurricane.

Soccer mom held up one arm, aimed the other at the drug dealer, and was clearly shouting a powerful spell; Eileen could see the currents of it wrapping around her arm like a snake made of electricity. The drug dealer knew it was bad and took off running, but there was a huge flash of light that made Eileen close her eyes and turn away to keep from being blinded. When the light faded, she looked at the fight again.

Both women were gone, as if they had never been there. The man was still in the crumpled up car, lights flashing like the alarm was going to do a damn thing.

What the hell ..? A witch fight, on a city street, where theoretically anyone could see it? And in a city currently being besieged by a decay demon? This couldn't have been a coincidence. This was connected.

But how and why, Eileen had no idea.


	4. The Nurse Who Loved Me

_**4 - The Nurse Who Loved Me**_

It seemed like the pathetic dance floor doubled in size the moment Sam had to push through it.

In his mind, he could easily picture Dean already dead face first on the table, in a puddle of blood and sick, so it was both anti-climactic and a relief to find he was still sitting with the blue haired barista, finishing off his needlessly strong cocktail.

Dean threw him one of his mischievous smiles, telling Sam he was in for something. "Sammy, glad you're here. This is Matt."

The blue haired barista gave him a smile and raised his hand, and Sam raised his hand awkwardly in return. "Dean, the guy from Poughkeepsie's at the bar."

At the use of their bug out word, all humor fled from Dean's expression, and he was back to business. It was always distressing to see Dean flip his moods on and off like a switch, but he'd honed the ability when they were kids, and Sam knew, with the gift of hindsight, that was part of Dean's survival mechanism. Be who people wanted to see, and they never questioned you. "Sorry Matt, gotta take care of this. See you later."

As soon as he was away from the table, Dean whispered, "Where's Eileen?"

"She's following the two that were at your table. The woman was a witch. You didn't take any of the pills, did you?"

"Are you crazy? No. I palmed them. I thought we might want to figure out what the fuck's in them first."

"Good thinking." It was. And he was glad Dean hadn't completely lost his head and indulged. Sam mentally chided himself for thinking Dean would do the dumb thing. He was a hunter first; he kept his head in the game.

As soon as they were outside, Sam's phone hummed, and he pulled it out to see Eileen had texted him her location. Good. They weren't that far behind.

"Matt wanted me to introduce you two," Dean said. "He's apparently totally into shy guys."

Sam sighed. "Dean ..."

"What? I never said you were interested. Just that I'd introduce you two."

"Do not pull me into this."

"Into what?" The smile he could hear in Dean's voice made Sam itchy to punch him. But he couldn't, not right now.

"This. Whatever this is. I'm not like you."

"No shit, Sherlock."

Sam gave him major bitchy side eye, but Dean was being cheerfully and deliberately oblivious. "I mean I'm not a con artist."

"Fuck you, you're a Winchester. Of course you are. Besides, that's not being a con artist. Who's being hurt? We shoot the shit, have a few drinks. No harm, no foul, no expectations. You need to loosen up, Sammy."

Sam stopped him, and said, "What have I told you about calling me Sammy?" Looking into Dean's happy face, Sam suddenly realized his eyes were a little off, and he was inordinately cheerful. "Oh shit. What did you take?"

"Nothing. I told you I didn't take them." Dean reached into his coat pocket, and dropped two purple gel caps into Sam's palm. Sam put them in his pocket, glad to have them away from Dean.

"One drink doesn't make you this happy. What are you on?"

Dean dipped his head side to side briefly, as if physically volleying the possibilities of truth or lying in his brain. "So, Tuck had a Vicodin in the pill bottle -"

"Oh my god. You took it with alcohol?"

"It's only one. And my knee feels great. It's gonna rain, you know? My knee always hurts before it rains. Not tonight, though."

Sam's phone hummed with another address update, and he let out a sigh and an eye roll as he continued down the street. "I can't take you anywhere."

"You always say that, and yet, you're always wrong."

Sam continued shaking his head. Truth be told, Dean was an expert at knowing his tolerances. He knew what he could handle and what he couldn't, born from years of experience. And Sam knew what he meant by his knee hurting before it rained. With Sam, it was his shoulder, and it had been throbbing a bit. Again, having taken the sheer amount of beatings they had in their lives, they were both lucky their skeletons weren't held together with metal pins and duct tape. If they hadn't know angels willing to heal them, they'd probably be constantly limping, with stiff joints that occasionally refused to work for them, and they'd never know a moment without pain. It was hard to believe that they could be considered lucky in any respect, with their cursed lives, and the sheer amount of dead loved ones in their wake, but it was true. Things seemed bad. It could have been so much worse, as hard as that was to fathom.

Which made Sam wonder about Castiel. Dean wasn't the only one worried about him, although Dean showed it more. They hadn't seen him since that disastrous visit to Lucifer's cage, and Dean thought he sounded funny on his last message. Sam agreed he was a little off, but there could have been dozens of reasons for that. Still, having him out of touch for so long with the Darkness threatening was a bit weird. But maybe he was on the trail of something that could save them.

Sam really wasn't going to say anything, he told himself not to open that door, but he couldn't help it. "So what did you do with Crowley in Portland?"

"Touristy shit. We got shitfaced a lot. Karaoke. Orgy. I think we went to a beach, but that might have been Northern California."

Sam held out a hand, stopping Dean. "Orgy?"

Dean shrugged. "I was a demon, dude. I did a lot of shit."

Sam had to take a minute to collect himself. Oh god. Why did he open this door? He knew a happy, pain pilled Dean was a more open than usual Dean, but he never wanted to know that Dean and Crowley had participated in an orgy together. He was going to need bleach to scrub this from his brain. Why did he do this? Why did he ask questions he knew he never wanted the answer to?

"Don't be so hung up, man. You had to have done some shit while you were possessed."

"Yes, but I didn't have an orgy with the King of Hell. Oh Christ. I can't even believe I just said that."

Dean patted him on the back. "And here I thought I was sparing you by not mentioning the stripping."

Sam felt himself go cold. Oh no. He was going to have to roofie himself. He didn't want to remember any of this. "What the hell are you -"

Thankfully, Sam never finished that dangerous question, because, off in the near distance, there was a noise like a cat crash, and the sound of a cat alarm blaring into the night. They were only a couple blocks behind Eileen, and that's exactly where the sound seemed like it was coming from. Sam instantly shoved aside his own horror at Dean's debauchery, as fear kicked in, and Sam started running. Dean followed quickly after.

Sam could hear a woman shouting, although he was sure it wasn't Eileen, and then there was this noise, kind of like a crack of lightning, but heavily muted, and a flash of light so bright it was like the sun briefly returned. And then it was over as quickly as it began, leaving behind nothing but the wailing of a cat alarm.

Sam imagined he should have expected it, but Dean somehow got ahead of him and went around the corner first, gun out in spite of the setting. He wasn't so stoned that his instincts didn't come through.

The way Dean said, "Eileen," was a relief. If she'd been harmed or not there, Dean's voice would have reflected it. Sam didn't pull any weapon, because they were too late.

"Okay, you guys missed the craziest shit," she said, and held out her phone. They both watched the replay, and she was correct. If Sam hadn't seen that flash of light, he may have thought this was something she cooked up on a computer.

"What the fuck ..?" Dean exclaimed, speaking for them all.

"I know, right?" Eileen said. "You guys seen anything like this before?"

Dean shook his head. "Pepper Potts is pissed."

It took Sam a moment to remember Gwyneth Paltrow played Pepper in the Iron Man movies. Sam wanted to know where Dean found the time to watch all these films, but then again, he found time for an orgy, so time organization skills were clearly a surprising thing he was good at. "It's a witch fight. We know from experience you really don't want to be in the middle of that."

"Do you think the demon's involved?" Eileen asked, putting away her phone.

"Oh wow. They'd have to be super stupid to get a demon up in their biz," Dean said. "So maybe."

The cat alarm continued to go off, and after that light show, it was hard to imagine some authorities hadn't been called, whether this was an iffy part of town or not. "Maybe we should discuss this back at the motel."

"And maybe we can ask," Dean said, wandering up the street. Sam had no idea what he was up to until he went to the ruined cat. Right, the pedestrian who hit the auto. Sam joined him, although he figured the guy had to be dead. That was a hell of a hit.

Which is why Sam was genuinely surprised when Dean said, "Cmon, Austin. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." The guy groaned as Dean peeled him away from the cat, and Sam helped. Of course Dean knew who he was, Matt introduced them.

Sam had no idea if he was a witch, but he'd survived being thrown down the street, and crushing a Honda like an empty tin can. He wasn't a normal human, unless he was currently dying from internal injuries. In which case, Dean really shouldn't have been moving him.

Oh well. Too late now. They'd have to see if he survived the trip to the motel, and move on from there.

* * *

Dean knew, in retrospect, he'd probably admitted too much to Sam. It wasn't that he was proud of any of it, it was just he felt so good. He probably shouldn't have mixed that Vicodin with a heavy cocktail, but hey, it got rid of shame as well as pain. That was the best kind of twofer.

Austin seemed to be recovering the whole way back, confirming he wasn't just an innocent bystander. He, Sam, and Eileen discussed options of what they could do. Eventually, they came to a consensus. They'd treat Austin like everything was normal and cool, and how he reacted would dictate how the rest of it went. Before they put him on the bed in Dean's room, they drew a witch trap on the floor, and put the bed over it. If Austin decided to go all witchy, he'd have nowhere to go.

Austin woke with a gasp, like he was having a bad dream, and not miraculously healing from a near fatal ass kicking. "Dude," Dean said, playing up his intoxication level. Austin would probably put his guard down if he thought he was completely wasted. "What happened?"

Austin sat up and looked around warily. He was all of twenty three looking, skinny and very much tending towards beanpole in his build, with short black hair, save for this little floppy bit that fell over his forehead on the right side. Dean assumed it was trendy, but had no idea, as he didn't care about that kind of thing. But it was such a stupid haircut, it had to have some greater purpose. "Who are these people?" he asked, using his head to gesture to Sam, who was standing in the far corner of the room, and Eileen, who was standing near the door. Dean was sitting close to the bed but out of grabbing range.

"This is Eileen, and that's Sam. Were you hit by a cat or something?"

He rubbed the back of his neck, and looked deeply confused. "Was Tansy anywhere around?"

Tansy was the dubious name of his female companion, a more curvaceous woman with lilac hair, and heavily kohled eyes. Dean kind of dug her, at least until he found out she was a witch. "No. Did she leave you there?"

"She wouldn't. Unless ..." Suddenly, a darkness seemed to come over Austin's eyes, and he glared at him. "Your name is Dean."

"Yeah?"

"And his name is Sam? Holy fucking shit." He held out his hand, and said something Latinish. And of course, nothing happened. He tried it again, to the same result.

"Cool. So we have a rep among witches?" Dean suspected as much, but confirmation was nice.

Austin's rage was so palpable it nearly made his eyes glow. "What did you do to me?"

"You really think we don't know how to handle witches by now?" Sam asked.

"Is this a good time to mention the witch killing bullets?" Dean wondered. Sam shrugged.

Austin looked both horrified and pissed off, which was ideal. "What the fucking fuck do you idiots want from me?"

"Okay, first up, there's no need for name calling," Dean said. "And two, what's in those pills you're peddling?"

Austin scoffed and rolled his eyes. He was one of those people with eyes so dark they almost looked black, which was kind of neat when it wasn't demonic. And he'd matched his nail polish to it, which was an interesting move, but it worked. What Dean didn't get was the piercing on his cheek. It was just a stud, but, ouch, and how easy would it be to rip out in a fight, and tear your whole cheek open? Just thinking about it made him wince. Still, Austin was a witch, and probably didn't go in for physical hand to hand. "Oh god, those are nothing. It was an attempt to make a little cash with a side hustle, you know? Some herbs shoved in a pill casing. There's nothing in them, except some dried spices you'd find in a store, that were downwind of a happy spell. It does fuck nothing except maybe make you feel mildly happy for twenty minutes, but people have been buying them up like they're the next kratom or something. It's fucking bananas. What's wrong with people?"

"Prove it," Dean said. He seemed sincere, but he didn't trust him.

Austin sighed. "Give me one of the pills you got."

Dean looked at Sam with a nod, and Sam tossed Austin one of the pills. He caught it, and then looked at them expectantly. "I'll need some water. I can't dry swallow like an addict."

Dean, who could dry swallow if he had to, took a bit of offense at that. But he still dug a flask out of his jacket and tossed it to him. He didn't know if it was his booze flask or the holy water one, and didn't much care either way.

Austin swallowed the pill with a swig from the flask, which made him grimace and gasp. "What the fuck is this, lighter fluid?"

Ah, that was his booze flask. "I'll have you know that's the finest whiskey the dollar store has," Dean said.

Austin only scowled at his joke. "How can you drink this stuff and still be living?"

"We have friends in all the wrong places." That wasn't even a joke, as far as Dean was concerned.

Austin took a final swig for the road, and then screwed the cap back and tossed it to Dean. "See? Harmless. And yet, it sells well enough that it's no longer our side hustle. It's a full time biz. We make more than we ever did as wage slaves. It makes no sense at all. These pills should be like eating a handful of oregano."

"It's probably the placebo effect," Sam said.

"Maybe. Can I go now?"

"Not yet. What the hell was this?" Eileen asked, stepping forward and playing the video on her phone.

Austin looked at it with obvious confusion, but soon he gasped, and he paled so much Dean thought he might genuinely faint. When it was over, he looked at all of them desperately. "You hafta save her. You think you're heroes, right? Prove it."

"Save who from what?" Dean wondered.

"Tansy from her mother."

Now Dean, Sam, and Eileen all shared the same surprised, disbelieving look. "That was her mother?" Eileen asked first.

That was the thing about really powerful witches. They were essentially ageless, as long as their powers kept chugging along. Look at Rowena - she was a few hundred years old, and yet, looked younger than Crowley.

Austin nodded. "She's this real Queen bitch. Tansy ran away to escape her. She wants her for something."

"What do you mean she wants her for something?" Dean asked.

"Tansy wouldn't tell me. She just said her mother planned to do something terrible to her, which is why she ran away from Haven Hills, even though her Mom essentially runs that place. I don't know why she wouldn't tell me exactly, but I figured 'cause it really freaked her the fuck out, and she's one of those kinds of people who thinks saying something out loud is as good as making it true, so ..."

Sam raised a hand, as if to ward off the torrent of words. "Hold up. Haven Hills?"

Austin rolled his eyes again, like this was the least important bit of the story. "Some nowhere suburban cul-de-sac outside Eugene. They're run by a coven, but they don't know that."

Okay. Dean mentally added that target to his to-do list. "Does what her mother is up to have anything to do with a decay demon?"

The kid's look was genuinely perplexed. "A what now?"

"It's hard to believe it's not connected," Eileen said.

Dean nodded. "It's gotta be."

"Hey, what the hell are you people talking about?" Austin asked. "What the fucking fuck is a decay demon?"

Sam decided to go for it, and why not? They had little to lose at this point. "Have you seen any big pools of mysterious black goop anywhere?"

Austin looked between all of them like they'd all grown third eyeballs in the center of their foreheads. "Are you on drugs? I mean, real drugs. Or are you having a stroke or something? 'Cause that's next level ..." he trailed off, staring at a nowhere point between the bed and the carpet. "Wait. There was that stuff outside Noah's place. Looked like someone melted a tire." He looked up. "Are you saying that's a sign of the decay demon?"

Dean kind of hated to break the news to him. As witches went, they'd met more obnoxious by a damn sight. "Yeah. That's all that remains of a person who's come in contact with the decay demon."

Austin's eyebrows hitched up until they were almost touching his hairline. "That's what happened to Noah?"

Dean shrugged. "If he's missing, it's a good bet."

"Holy fuck." He put a hand to his mouth in shock, and if it was an act, he was a hell of an accomplished actor. "You have to stop it. Why aren't you stopping it?"

Sam frowned. "We're trying, but we don't know where it is."

"Locator spell," he snapped, like they were complete idiots.

"Doesn't work on most demons, especially high powered ones," Sam said.

"It does when I do them," Austin said. "Agree to help Tansy, and I'll help you."

Dean, Sam, and Eileen all shared a look again. This night had certainly taken some odd turns, hadn't it?


	5. A Rock and A Hard Place

_**5 - A Rock and A Hard Place**_

Trusting witches was a new thing for Eileen, but Sam and Dean seemed to be for it, with varying degrees of certainty. There seemed to be a general belief that Austin would double cross them as soon as possible, but as long as they were ready for it, it could be handled. Sam thought he could get some souped up protection bags together for all of them, and Eileen volunteered to get the stuff, because she had a lot of it in her trunk.

The Winchesters weren't the only ones with a loaded vehicle, although hers didn't have so much in the way of grenade launchers and guns more than an assortment of herbs and costumes. An odd mix, sure, but she learned quite a bit about magical herbs when she had a brief but intense flirtation with botany in her teens, and she also learned around about that same time that maids and janitorial staff were often invisible to most people. Their uniforms were kind of like a get into any building free card. They may have had their agent grift, but she had been cleaning staff across half this country.

She also had a collection of small bones, as they were useful in protection bags, and usually the hardest to find on short notice. Sam did come out to her car with her, since Dean was more than capable of watching Austin on his own, especially since he was still stuck in the witch trap, and negotiations for how he would help them was still ongoing.

When Sam saw she kept the herbs and bones all neatly labeled inside a fishing tackle kit, he laughed, and signed, "Awesome."

"There's no point in keeping these things if they aren't sorted and labeled for quick access."

"I may have to put one together for the Impala."

"Copycat," she teased, and he smiled. She had to admit she wasn't used to working cases with other hunters, but this wasn't so bad. Who knew chasing down a demon would end up in a war against a coven? And they still had to figure out what they were going to do with the decay demon. How had one simple case gotten so complicated?

They returned to the motel room to find them still talking, but at least they had some intelligence to work off of. Tansy's mother was named Elsbeth Parr, went by Beth, and was apparently around two hundred years old? Austin wasn't sure about the exact age, but felt it was around there.

Eileen decided to do a search see if she had a Facebook page, and what began as a goof turned into a little bit of mortal terror, as she actually found it, and it was a nightmare.

She was a thin slip of a blonde, suburban domestic goddess, and all the photos on her page could have been straight from a Martha Stewart magazine or Goop. She was married to an orthopedic surgeon, and looked like she could float away on a cloud of money and smug. Eileen had always wondered how people could live like that, even taking monsters out of the equation. There was so much need in the world. Eileen was kind of glad she was a witch, because then she was free to hate her.

She showed the page to Sam, who looked confused at first, and then angry. "Oh god. Take a look at this." Sam passed it to Dean.

Dean gazed at it with no change of expression. "Yeah, she looks like a Stepford Wife. What are the odds the entire coven looks like this?"

Sam shrugged, giving Eileen the phone back. "Probably pretty good."

"I wonder if all this heteronormative, conformist bullshit is pushed by evil people," Austin said. He hadn't seen the page, but clearly he didn't need to.

"Aren't you evil?" Dean wondered.

Austin scowled at him. "Not all witches are evil, hunter. Can I say the same about you?"

"Depends on the day," Dean replied. Sam gave him a look she couldn't interpret. Clearly this was an inside joke or problem between the two of them. They seemed to have quite a few of those.

As far as Austin knew, the cover was six plus Beth. He only knew the names of four of the other coven members: Sue Anne, Cherry, Mina, and Laura. Names that just reeked evil. The main debate in the discussion seemed to be whether they should do a spell to find decay demon first, or hit the coven. Austin was insistent they should hit the coven first, because who knew how much time Tansy had, but Dean was pretty sure the thing going around randomly melting people was bad. Eileen was still weighing options - to be brutally honest, she wanted to get the demon, because she'd been hunting it long enough, and she didn't know if they should really interfere in a witch fight - but then Sam pointed out the coven might know this demon and what it's here for. If that was the case, they had no choice but to help Tansy first.

That still brought problems. Namely, Austin thought he could overpower one member of the coven at a time, but only if he got the drop on them, and how long that would last depended a great deal on how strong they were. Dean pointed out they only needed one of them alive, which, while cold blooded, was correct. If they were a powerful witch, and you weren't sure you could contain them, destroy was pretty much the only option on the table. She'd had a couple of run in with witches, and would rather not relive those episodes.

Finally, Dean took out a part of the witch trap with his foot, releasing Austin. She and Sam were ready, in case it was all a ruse, but he seemed to be honest about wanting to help Tansy. Sam had given Eileen some witch killing bullets, which she hadn't known existed. Even if she didn't use them this time, they were bound to be handy.

It was decided they'd all take one car into Haven Hills, namely the Winchesters' car, and Sam gave up his usual place in the passenger seat as he wanted to sit in the back and keep an eye on Austin. Eileen wasn't sure if it was necessary to be that paranoid, but she got the impression they hated dealing with witches, and had probably had as many bad times as she had had with them, if not more.

During the drive, breaking a long period of silence, Austin said, "You know, Tansy told me something that might have something to do with what's going on." Eileen had angled the rearview so she could read lips if she had to. Dean didn't object. "She told me she was an only child, but the fourth of her Mom's kids."

Eileen had hoped she'd read his lips incorrectly, because if that was true, it was fucking grim. It must have been true, though, because Dean asked, "Where were the other four? Dead?"

Austin shrugged. "She wasn't big on details. As I said, she didn't like to discuss her Mom. She was really afraid of her, and thought if she talked about her, her mother would somehow pick it up."

"She's that powerful?" Sam asked. Austin shrugged.

"If she sacrificed her kids, used them in blood rituals, she might be," Dean said. "Spells that takes lives or souls - or ideally both - are the most powerful."

Sam looked as appalled as Eileen felt. "You're right, but ... what kind of mother sacrifices all her children?"

"A shitty one," Eileen said.

They fell back into silence for a while, and Dean sped up. Eileen tried to use Beth's Facebook page to find the other members of her coven, and she found Sue Anne and Laura (maybe). The Stepford Wife comment was right on track, as they looked like they could have been Beth's sisters: willowy, blonde, expensive. The type of woman who went to country clubs and wouldn't think twice about throwing down a couple thousand for a scarf they might never wear. It was kind of comforting to think all these kind of people were child sacrificing witches, but probably not.

She remained curious about Austin. He seemed like a kid, but she knew, with witches ages were always negotiable. He could be three hundred. "What's your story?" she asked him, once he made eye contact in the mirror. "You claim to be good."

He rolled his eyes. It was very teen like, so kudos to him on doing his homework. "I am good. It's kinda racist that you think all witches are evil."

"Witches aren't a race," Sam said.

"Sometimes we kind of are," Austin snapped.

"Is that your story? Your parents were witches?" Eileen asked. It was weird, but from what she had determined, you could be a born witch, learn to be a witch, or ask a demon to make you a witch. There didn't seem to be much of a power variance between the types, based on that alone. It all depended on so many factors, you couldn't possibly track them all. She was willing to bet Sam had tried, though.

"My dad. My Mom's just works for the post office. My absentee Dad turned out to be this big swinging dick black magician, and he showed up on my fifteenth birthday, assuming I'd inherit his "throne", or whatever the fuck. Imagine how pissed he was when he discovered his son didn't want it, and was non-binary. He wanted me to cut the "pansy shit" and embrace my "destiny" - he used lots of air quotes - " - and I told him he could go fuck himself. But he was persistent, and let it be known if I didn't straighten up and do what he said, he'd hurt my Mom and make me."

"What'd you do?" Dean asked.

"I did what I could do. I faked my own death and ran away to Portland. I mean, I know it's a shitty thing to subject my Mom to, but it was better than the alternative where she ends up dead. I figure, if my Dad ever keels over, I can go apologize to her."

"What's his name?" Dean asked. He had this look in his eye like he was keeping a shit list, of things to be killed later. Her initial impression of Dean was as Sam's cute but dumb brother, but since getting to know them, she had adjusted that. He wasn't dumb about everything, and while he had an edge of cocky to him, he could generally back that up. Despite his good time Charlie act tonight, he was fucking lethal. On his shit list was the one place on earth you never wanted to be.

"He called himself Prospero, but there's no fucking way that's his real name."

"Shakespeare, right?" Dean said. "Pretentious asshat." Sam was giving him a surprised look from the backseat, and he must have noticed. "There was a movie. Helen Mirren was in it."

Sam smirked and shook his head. Another running joke between them? She had no idea how they did it. She'd never keep track of them all.

Austin used a hand mirror to try and scry for Tansy's position, but reported she must have had a magical block on her. The search for Beth ended up the same, but Eileen had already found her home address, so they just had to hope she was at or near her house.

She recalled what Austin had said, and asked, "Are we using the right pronouns?" Some non-binary people went by gender neutral pronouns they/them, but some stuck to the old, gendered he or she. It really depended on the person. He might be a witch, but she didn't want to misgender them. That seemed petty.

Austin looked surprised. "Yeah. I mean, I'm used to he, so I go by that."

"Okay."

"Thanks for asking. Not a lot of people do."

She shrugged. "I'm Irish. We're polite, even when we're kicking your ass."

"I thought that was the Brits," Dean said.

"The Brits pretend they're polite, but it has so many layers of passive-aggressiveness, I don't know how any of you ever buy it." She knew that that was probably misguided Irish nationalism talking, but so what? There were no Brits in the car.

When they made a stop for gas, Austin said he thought he might be able to break through the magical block on Beth and Tansy with a few ingredients, and luckily, the Winchesters had them in the trunk. So while Dean pumped gas and looked on, Austin set up his scrying area in an empty patch of asphalt on the far right side of the gas station, and Eileen and Sam were closer, looking on with curiosity.

Austin cut his finger this time, dripping blood on the mirror. He was saying something, but Eileen didn't bother figuring out what, because it didn't matter. She was never going to replicate a blood magic scrying spell.

At first, she didn't know what was going on. It looked like it failed, but then, after a moment, the mirror started to faintly glow. The blood became even more liquid on its surface, the drops blending together, and seemingly boiling away, although how could that be?

The blood disappeared, and suddenly the mirror was showing a place, like it was a window. Austin raised a fist in triumph, and said, "I've got them! I know where they are."

"Where?" Sam asked, stepping closer to see what was in the mirror. To Eileen, it was just a leafy place, a/k/a any place in most of Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest in general.

"It's a church and a graveyard in Haven Hills. Beth and Tansy are together."

"Prime human sacrifice location," Dean said.

Sam nodded, lips thinning in a grim line. "New Moon too. Not a terrible phase for it either."

Did she want to know if there were bad phases of the moon for human sacrifice? Eileen decided no, that was information she could live without.

This time, when they got back on the road, Sam and EIleen sat in the back, and Austin sat in the passenger seat, using his scrying mirror as a kind of mystical GPS. Sam signed at her, beneath the shadow of the seats, so neither Dean nor Austin could see it. "You ready?" he asked.

She signed at the same level, so they could have their secret conversation. "As I'll ever be."

"Break up any human sacrifices before?"

"No, you?"

"A couple of times. They can go off the rails really fast, so stay alert."

"Always am."

They shared a smile, which made Dean look at them funny in the rearview. Eileen was relieved that they had done this before, because she never had. Although it did beg the question, how many human sacrifices happened? If they'd broken up a couple ... wow. She had seriously underestimated the number of witches, and demons who liked this sort of thing. You would have thought they had better things to do.

Dean stashed the Impala at the head of a dark street, and they cut through to the cemetery on foot, through a little tree lined area that probably protected these houses from having to see it. People were weirdly squeamish about graveyards, but were they aware of all the dead people under their feet? Seriously. So many people had died through the ages, and how many had "proper" burials? She remembered handling a case of haunting back in Ireland, where the ghost's body was submerged in a peat bog, so she couldn't recover the bones, not to mention burn them. Unless she wanted to burn the whole bog. The dead were everywhere, and people were goddamn lucky they weren't hip deep in ghosts every day.

The scrim of trees was not very deep, so they were in the cemetery before they realized it, stepping over a mostly ornamental rock border that wouldn't have kept a squirrel with three feet out of the graveyard, which made Eileen think either the teenagers around here had something else to do, or were too posh for casual vandalism. Either/or? Or maybe the witches were really territorial about it. They could already see what looked like a bonfire closer to a dark structure that must have been the church, and Eileen suddenly had an awful thought. They didn't burn people alive, did they? Traditionally, witches were burned at the stake, which was barbaric and fucked up, but could they have re-appropriated it for some reason?

Dean, who was leading the way, suddenly stopped and briefly held up a clenched fist, which made Sam stop instantly. She and Austin were both equally confused, but stopped because they did. He pointed down, and at first she couldn't see anything but darkness and dirt. Then Eileen remembered there should be more grass than dirt here.

Her eyes adjusted, and she could see a wide swath of black that started from the eastern side of the graveyard, and seemed to make a path towards the church. It was bubbling, like there were small things trying to push up from underneath. But then the smell hit - shit, with a hint of sweet rot. Death, and what the decay demon left behind.

Holy shit. The demon was here too.

Eileen tried to imagine this was a positive - two birds, one stone - but how could it be? They got confirmation the demon was connected to the witches, but they still had no idea how to kill it, or what it was looking for. Now was probably not the best time to find out if witch killing bullets would hurt a demon, but they had little choice.

Dean found a way around the rot trail, as no one wanted to touch it - it probably wasn't contagious, but she bet the smell never came out - and eventually they came to a nice mausoleum they could hide behind, and take turns looking out towards the back of the church.

You could see people now, although as far as Eileen could see, only women, mostly blonde. The coven was in session. She kept looking around for the lilac haired girl, but she didn't see her. At least the bonfire didn't have anyone on it. At least for now.

Something jumped out at her as very strange - all the flowers. There was a whole bunch of deep red roses scattered around, enough that you could kind of smell them mingled with the scent of decay, and it looked like there was a curtain of them near the back of the church. She signed to Sam, "What are the flowers for?"

He looked around the mausoleum, and must have spotted them, because when he looked back at her, he shook his head, signing, "No idea. That's new."

"Anyone have eyes on the demon?" Dean asked. He was met with a quiet chorus of nos. It would be the biggest hitch in this plan, and they couldn't even find him. Goddamn it.

Austin looked at them all desperately. She could smell the flop sweat coming off of him. His Dad may have been a black magician, but clearly he wasn't. "What are we supposed to do?"

"Do you have a big spell you can hit them with that'll knock them off balance?" Dean said. "Do that. Then we'll start shooting. Let's keep one of the lesser witches alive for questioning. Mommy Dearest has to die first. Whoever has the best shot, take it."

"You are a deeply messed up person," Austin said.

Dean just shrugged and dipped his head, like it was a fair cop, and raised his weapon, waiting.

Austin was saying some words, and conjured up a glowing ball of energy in his hands, like calling up a tiny electrical storm, and you know what? Eileen mentally took back saying it didn't seem like he was the son of a black magician, because now it totally seemed like he was.

Once he finished saying the spell, he threw the ball of energy like a physical object, and it seemed to explode over the coven, sending witches flying, and lighting up the area briefly like a spotlight had swung down on them.

Eileen had stepped out from behind the mausoleum and put a witch killing bullet in the chest of the first witch she saw, but it didn't stop her from noticing, with the light bright enough for all to see, that there bodies were around the church. Three with slit throats, and another three that were little more than bubbling black pools of decay.

What the fuck kind of witch/demon sacrifice party had they walked into here? Her bad feeling about all of this got one thousand times worse.


	6. Death Reflects Us

_**6 - Death Reflects Us**_

Dean wondered at what point he could call a time out for everything being too fucked up. Probably never, but that was a shame, because things were really fucked.

Although the initial assault was perfect - fast, smooth, uncomplicated - two thing immediately stood out. One - Mommy Dearest and her kid weren't here. Two - neither was the demon. In the church? Then why didn't they come out spells blazing? Was this a trap? In Dean's mind, that was the only answer.

One of the witches got off a spell that was aimed at them, but Austin intercepted it, and Dean swapped guns and shot her in the leg with a regular bullet. She wasn't Beth, and all her other friends were dead. They needed her to talk.

Austin, surprisingly, was the first one to reach the fallen Stepford Wife, and demanded, "Where's Tansy?"

She attempted to call up another spell, but Eileen was there, pressing her gun against her temple. "I wouldn't," she said.

Stepford still looked like she was thinking about it. "You're too late," she spat. "You can't stop the ceremony."

"Wanna bet?" Dean said, heading for the church. He was only a foot or so away from the door when he started to feel pressure. It was heat and force, like trying to walk into a radiant electrical field, and he stopped dead maybe two arm's lengths from the door. He couldn't reach it. "What the hell is this? Did you put a spell on the church?" That would explain why Mommy Dearest and the decay demon - now there was a band name - hadn't come out. It was safer in there.

"You weren't invited," she said.

Austin held up his hand, which now had an orb of energy crackling in it. "Take it down, or I'll melt your fucking face off."

She glared at him with open contempt. "Melt away, little boy. You're never getting in there. Go back to your kiddie pool, Mary Potter."

Austin scowled, and the orb of energy in his hand grew brighter. You'd think she'd have been scared of it, but Stepford just laughed.

"What is going on in there?" Sam demanded. "What are any of you getting out of this bargain?"

Stepford looked at him with bright eyes, looking like she was about to break down in hysterics. But not out of fear. Out of pure, unadulterated joy. Dean couldn't think of a worse response. "Immortality, asshole."

Eileen had kept the gun on Stepford, but her eyes went wide, and she pointed at the witch she'd put down earlier. Dean turned, gun up.

The dead woman's body twitched and jerked, and the witch killing bullet in her chest was spit out like a wad of gum before she started climbing back up to her feet. All the dead witches were doing this, spasming on the ground as if having seizures, and lurching back to their feet, grinning through the blood.

Sam put a bullet in the head of the first one, sending her to the ground again. Probably not for long. Austin was standing there, open mouthed, orb of energy still crackling in his hand. "What do I do?" he asked, genuinely looking for direction.

Okay. Dean quickly formulated a plan. "Get the church open," he told Austin. "Do what you hafta do, bring that spell down." Dean holstered his gun, and traded it for the mini-machete he had in his coat. He brought it because it was good to have with witches and demons around, and now it was the best of a bad situation. He went up to a formerly dead witch climbing back to her feet, and swung for the fences, slicing through her neck and sending her head flying. Immortality was great, but getting your head removed while immortal? A complete bitch and a half. Or so he imagined. He wouldn't want it happening to him.

"Sam," he said, beheading witch number two. "Reanimator time."

"What?" Eileen said. Either she didn't catch it, or didn't understand the reference. Which was a shame, because that was a good movie. Did no one respect the classics anymore?

"Remove the heads," Sam told her.

"You son of a bitch," one of the removed heads cursed at him from the dark. "I'm going to turn you into a labradoodle."

That actually made Dean pause. What a horrible fate.

He felt a spell crash against him, something oily and creepy, that briefly made it feel like a thousand army ants were biting him. The protection bag he had held, but not well. Another spell might hit home. Dean charged the witch that threw it at him, and expected her to hit him with another spell, but she surprised him by grabbing his wrist and throwing him to the ground. He kept hold of the machete, though, even as he hit the dirt hard enough to lose most of his breath. "You think we're unprepared for the likes of you?" she snarled. It was an odd look that didn't quite fit her yoga mom facade. Dean wondered what she really looked like. Not only could witches play with time, they could play with appearance too.

She had more to say, but Dean never heard it, because a blade popped right through the center of her neck, and sliced clean through to the other side. Eileen didn't quite get it all, so she had to kick her head off like a soccer ball once the Stepford hit the ground. Dean wished he'd done that. She reached down and gave him a hand up, and he gave her a thankful nod.

Austin screamed, although it was more out of frustration than pain, and a shield flared around the church, golden and gossamer. It seemed to burn away to ash, and Austin collapsed at the foot of the door. Sam was closest, so he checked on him first. "He's still alive, but he's passed out."

"Did he do it?" Dean asked.

Sam turned and tried the door. He was able to reach it, and led the way inside, gun first.

Dean put away his machete and pulled out his gun, but he wasn't sure why. Beth was as immortal as her pals. Did they ever have a shot at putting her down? The only answer Dean could see was they had to kill the demon, and hopefully that would be enough to renege on the immortality deal. If it didn't, they'd have to figure something else out.

Dean was expecting your usual human sacrifice scene, which usually involved people chained on altars, and varying amounts of blood, which is why what he saw made him pause. First of all, that weird rose motif? Continued. The aisle to the altar was a carpet of red roses, some of which were starting to turn black and wither while they watched. Where the altar should have been was a metal pole driven into the floor, and Tansy was chained to it, head down as if she was unconscious.

Mommy Dearest was standing behind her, and for what it was worth, a woman wearing yoga pants to her own daughter's blood sacrifice seemed super disrespectful. "Let her go," Sam demanded. He had her dead to rights, but Dean still didn't see what a witch killing bullet was going to do to a woman who could apparently shrug it off. Again, cut off the head, and ideally, mail it to Kurdistan. A body without a head wasn't much use to anything, living or not.

She smiled in a truly crazy way, her eyes glowing with that special light of madness that, in all honesty, made Dean want to turn around and leave. The crazy ones were always the fucking worst, whether they had powers or not. "Of course." She touched the chains holding her daughter to the post, and they snapped and fell away. Tansy dropped face first to the floor. "You're too late, hunters. You can't hurt me, and you can't save her."

Sam shot her in the head, probably because he was pissed off. But it worked even less on Mommy Dearest. She staggered back a few steps, but the bullet hole started healing almost immediately, and she laughed. "My lord Vetis is a just god, which is why you idiots will be the first to rot."

Vetis? That was on Sam's short list of possible decay demons. At least they had a confirm on what this fucker's name was. Not that it helped right now.

Dean was trying to figure out how he could sneak around and get the drop on Mommy Dearest with his machete, when Tansy started to move. He was shocked, because he honestly thought she was dead.

She sat up slow, pushing herself upright, and her body language was so strange, it was only a mild surprise when they saw her eyes were pitch black holes in her face, and black ooze was trailing down her face, like slimy liquid mascara.

Dean's heart sunk. She wasn't a sacrifice in a traditional sense; her mother turned her into a vessel for the goddamn thing. A fate worse than death. It made him briefly flash back on the time he was- very briefly - a vessel for a demon lord. Not that he remembered a whole bunch about that time. He was a teenager, and it was just another shitty thing in a childhood full of shitty things. He remembered agreeing to do it to free Sam, because his consent was the only leverage he had, and Dad shot him to save him, killing the demon with a special bullet. He didn't remember that specifically, but he remembered waking up in the hospital, feeling like someone had taken Thor's hammer to his chest cavity. He hadn't expected getting shot to hurt so fucking much, although you'd think it would. Whatever happened to that psychic who tried to warn him to get out of town? He never found her again. And oh yeah - didn't that demon lady in charge of resurrecting the demon, didn't she sort of sexually assault him? Kinda? Yeah, there was a reason he was happy to let these childhood memories die. He had enough bad memories for four or five lifetimes. He didn't need to dredge up others.

Mommy Dearest was grinning so wide it looked like her head might split in half from the lips up. "You should be grateful. He'll kill you quick. I wouldn't have."

Dean hated this, because there were no good options here. "Tarantino the mother, then we go for the demon," he muttered. Sam gave him a look like _this is a shitty plan_ , and Dean responded with his usual corresponding look, which was _give me a better one_. Sam looked away, which meant he didn't have one.

Eileen was giving him a deeply puzzled look, because she had no idea what his movie short hand was all about. So he mouthed "Empty the clip," at her, as he hadn't learned how to sign that, which seemed like a gross oversight on his part. It was more likely to come up in hunting than anything else.

Dean figured, if they riddled Mommy Dearest with enough bullets, it would least take her a minute to heal, and in that minute, they'd have a crack at the demon. Not a lot of time, but it was all they had. Dean wondered if there was any way to save Tansy, or if the moment the demon touched her, she was lost. He had an angel blade, he had a holy Molotov like Dad used to make, full of holy water and salt. Holy water probably wouldn't work on a demon as powerful as Vetis. When mixed with salt? Maybe. No guarantees. But worth a shot. Dean figured he'd need to get about twenty feet closer before he could throw the angel blade with the accuracy he needed. If he was good, he could hit Tansy with the blade in a way that would kill Vetis, but maybe not her. If they could get her help in time; if Vetis didn't destroy her the way it destroyed all its previous vessels, by melting them into liquid piles of rotted carbon. He didn't know her, but he felt he owed her a chance, as slim as it was. And even though killing her quick with a blade would be a thousand times more merciful than a death by rotting.

They all fired, sending a barrage of witch killing bullets towards Mommy Dearest, but Tansy had lurched to her feet, and held up her hand.

And the bullets stopped.

They hung in the air as if caught by an invisible barricade. Dean was briefly impressed with the number, as they managed to shoot twelve bullets in the same amount of time as firing a single bullet. A credit to their mutual hunting experience, and semi-automatic guns. But it was just a brief flash of pride, completely buried by the fact that they were totally, utterly fucked.

Tansy/Vetis dropped their hand, and the bullets fell harmlessly to the carpet of rotting roses. Black goop ran down Tansy's face like she was already decaying from the inside. Mommy Dearest was still grinning at them, and seemingly trying not to laugh. "Is that all you got, you stupid bastards?"

Dean wasn't going to tell her yes, but god, he was thinking it.

* * *

 _N.B.: The possessed by a demon memory Dean has is a reference to my story Rain Dogs, because apparently I'm making my own continuity now._


	7. You Were A Kindness

_**7 - You Were A Kindness**_

Sam was quickly running through everything he knew about powerful demons in his head, and hoped that Vetis would surface at the last second, and save them from a grisly fate.

Boy, it was some imagination he had. You'd think he'd have learned, after all this time, that luck rarely broke the WInchesters' way when they really needed it. Perfect blank on Vetis. Okay, not perfect - he was known as "the corrupter", which made perfect sense. Corruption was another way of saying rot. Of course, the lore had him tempting the saintly to sin, but that was actually a very generic descriptive for most demons. Rotting people would have been more accurate. If he lived through this, he was adding that to the lore.

Again! What a imagination he had. Like living through this was an option.

He glanced at Dean, who had slammed down his resolute poker face. It was his _you're gonna kill me but I'm gonna strangle you with your own intestines first_ look, and honestly, how monsters didn't run the second they saw it was simply another constant mystery to Sam. He been to Hell and to Purgatory and back. Sam had little trouble believing Dean would storm the gates and return, if only to kill the bastard who killed him. Dean held a grudge like Gollum held the Ring.

Sam wondered if there was any way to at least spare Eileen, who didn't deserve to die like this - he could see arguments for him and Dean, and they were fairly valid - when Tansy/Vetis held out her hand, and Beth suddenly stood ramrod straight, gasping as she did so. Tansy/Vetis said, in a painful voice that sounded like a plethora of rusty hinges had come together and learned to speak, "You had one job. Find me a viable vessel. How could you be this incompetent for so long and expect I'd reward you?"

Beth made a strangled noise, and tried to move, but couldn't. And black goop started oozing out her mouth.

From how big her eyes got, she was trying to scream, but she was melting inside out, and couldn't. To say it was extravagantly cruel and grotesque seemed like an understatement. But with Vetis's attention on Beth, Dean decided to make a move.

He ran up the aisle of rotted roses as best he could - that stuff looked slippery - and threw a holy Molotov at Tansy/Vetis, which broke open on their leg. There was an instantly sizzling noise, like an egg in a skillet, but it was impossible to say if Tansy/Vetis even noticed it.

Sam decided to try and help, and switched his gun with the witch killing bullets for the one with silver bullets. Okay, those generally just worked on werewolves, but demons were rarely fans of it either. He looked over at Eileen, and said, "Silver bullets if you've got them."

Sam opened fire, pumping bullet after bullet into Tansy/Vetis - or trying to. They all stopped short, ricocheting off at weird angles. The Molotov got to Tansy/Vetis, but didn't bring down the shield around it. A disappointing development, but not an unexpected one.

Dean threw his angel blade, and it didn't bounce off the barricade; it went straight into Tansy's/Vetis's chest, on the upper right side. Dean may have gotten a lung, or possibly not. It was down to centimeters, but Dean was usually extremely good with his aim, so he had to know what he was doing.

Tansy/Vetis turned away from Beth, who was now only a torso in a still growing pool of black slime. She appeared to somehow still be alive, which must have been further cruelty inflicted by the demon. Dean made a hand gesture behind his back - the signal for run - as he suddenly froze. The demon looked down at the angel blade in his chest, and snickered. "Really? You think this divine cast off is enough to hurt me, human?"

Sam got it, way too late. Dean was throwing himself on this grenade so Sam and Eileen had a chance to get away. Admittedly, they had nothing here, but he hated it when he did this. As if his life was somehow more disposable than theirs.

But, Sam wanted to at least get Eileen out of here. Maybe if he could, he could figure out a way to kill this thing and save Dean. If there was any saving him. Dean made a choking noise, and Sam was suddenly glad he could only see the back of him.

They hadn't even moved a foot when the door of the church slammed open, and Austin came in, yelling some spell. It was old Latin, and delivered so quickly Sam could only make out half the words, but he knew it was dark magic simply because what little he heard of the spell made him shudder.

Dean must have been released, because he fell to the aisle, still in one piece. Beth was now gone, nothing more than a humongous black puddle dripping off the altar. Tansy/Vetis looked towards Austin, as alarmed as the thing could show, while the angel blade in its chest seemed to ... shrink? No.

It was melting. It was melting into the demon.

Sam ran to Dean, to make sure he wasn't melting into a puddle of goo - what could he do if he was? - and Tansy/Vetis threw Austin up against the wall, but he was still shouting the spell, and by now the angel blade had completely melted inside Tansy's/Vetis's chest. It made a strange, strangled noise, sort of a scream, and seemed to be pawing at its own chest. Sam, down on his knees beside Dean, pulled out his gun again and opened fire, and Eileen joined him. This time two of the bullets got through, hitting Tansy/Vetis in the shoulder and the hip, respectively. Sam was trying to shoot to wound, because if Tansy could survive this, they had to make all effort to try and ensure it.

Dean had some of the black ooze on his face, coating his chin and neck, but it didn't seem like he was still melting, so that was a positive.

The demon writhed and staggered, and then turned away. Probably a mercy, because Tansy/Vetis vomited up an almost comical amount of black slime, a copious gush of it, something any human body could not have feasibly contained, before collapsing on the altar.

Austin had sunk to the floor, and looked like he was on the verge of passing out again. "What was that?" Eileen asked him.

"Uh, honestly? I don't know. It was in my head after I woke up, and I decided to use it, because it felt angry and powerful."

Dean wiped the goop off his face, and said, "Maybe your Dad came through for you for once. Or you did. Who knows? Thanks for the save." He seemed okay. but Dean seemed to be breathing harder than usual, and he leaned back against Sam for a moment, which was okay by him. Dean was alive, and that was more than he could have hoped for.

"Is she alive?" Austin asked.

They all knew who he was referring to, and no one, it seemed, wanted to check. Sam made sure Dean was okay for now, and got up, approaching the altar.

It was all black goop, and the smell was beyond vile. It was like someone had boiled down a thousand corpses and made them into a slurry. He figured if he could check on Tansy and not vomit, he was ahead of the game. He turned her over carefully, to see if she was still melting, and she didn't appear to be. There was black goo on her face, but it wasn't running. Sam found a clean place on her neck to put his fingers, and feel for a heartbeat. He was about to report she was dead when he felt a very faint pulse. Extremely faint. "She's alive," he reported. For how long he couldn't say.

"Holy shit, really?" Austin exclaimed.

"Yeah, but we need to get her to a hospital now." Sam picked her up, and felt the goo sticking to his arms. Unavoidable. He could get rid of his shirt and jacket later.

Eileen had helped Dean to his feet, and while most of the slime was off his face, enough of it had ran down his shirt that Sam understood why he was unsteady and his eyes were a little glazed. He wanted to punch him for his little stunt, but that would have to wait until he was recovered.

Until they were all recovered. If that day ever came.

* * *

Somehow, they were lucky. It seemed weird to say that, considering the damage, but they were.

Vetis didn't just screw over Beth. He screwed over the entire coven, who were puddles of goo all around the graveyard. Sam had no idea how the clean up crew was going to handle that or explain it, but thankfully, that wasn't his job.

Austin took over the excuse to the emergency room staff, about finding Tansy like this, and they seemed to believe him, which was something. They did look at him, Dean, and Eileen funny, perhaps wondering if this was some kind of trafficking situation, but as soon as Tansy was taken back, and Austin said he had this, they left.

The smell on their clothes was unbearable. Sam ended up stripping off his shirt and coat in the parking lot and trading them for back ups in the trunk, and Dean did the same, although he only traded his shirt in, as his jacket was fine. Somehow that figured. But it really was for the best, as getting all the weapons out of Dean's coat probably would have taken twenty minutes.

Eileen waited in the car the whole time, but when they got back in, she held up a piece of paper, on which she had written the number nine. "I'd have given you both a ten if I got a lap dance with it," she said, and Dean laughed. Sam could only smile, because, goddamn, he was exhausted. Not just physically - in every way it was possible to be tired, he was. It wasn't even that they almost all got killed tonight, although that was a big part of it.

It was the special kind of despair that hit him when family killed or tried to kill its own. Again, why fight for humanity when it was going to act like this? And then there was the secondary problem, which Dean brought up at a stoplight. "About Austin."

"Yeah," Sam said, with a small sigh.

"That spell he cast," Eileen said. "That was crazy black magic, wasn't it?"

Dean nodded. "It saved my bacon, so I've got no right to complain. But ..."

"We'll probably need to keep an eye on him," Sam said. He'd already decided that on his own. Just because his Dad was powerful shithead, it didn't mean that Austin would be a powerful shithead. But tonight might have been a kind of magical awakening for him. He wanted to save Tansy so much he tapped into something. Maybe he could close that door, and go back to peddling happy pills to clueless hipsters, and everything would go back to the way it was. But Sam was painfully aware of when he started drinking demon blood, and opened that new door on his powers. After a certain amount of time, with Dean back, he wanted to close that door. And he couldn't. Some doors never wanted to be closed, and you were an idiot for ever thinking they could be.

Once they were back at the motel, when they were all out of the car, Sam waited until he was in the room with Dean before he said, "Stop doing that."

Dean looked around, confused. "Turning on the light?"

Sam glared at him, because he was being deliberately clueless. Dean liked to pretend he was dumb, but that was more of his camouflage. He wasn't, but most of the time he rather you didn't know that. Just like he would rather you not know that he felt things so deeply it sometimes crippled him. A macho act was so much easier to swallow. "Volunteering to die. I thought we were past that."

Dean took off his coat, and looked at him like he was going off the rails. "I was trying to kill the demon, not die." Sam repeated the run hand signal back at him, and Dean frowned. "That was making the best of a bad situation."

"That you put yourself in, deliberately. Drawing Vetis's focus."

Dean sighed, and sat on the edge of his bed. "What do you want me to say? I've looked out for you my whole life. I couldn't stop it now even if I wanted to."

That rare moment of complete honesty set Sam back a bit, but it was probably intended to do just that. "I'm not taking care of the Darkness myself. You hear me?"

He threw up his hands in surrender. "I got it. But I have a better plan. Let's not go into a battle against a decay demon and a pack of crazy witches without knowing what we're in for, hey?"

Sam nodded. "That is the dream." He didn't know if Dean really heard him or not, but he was still kind of tired, and wasn't up to pushing much harder. Not right now.

He decided to go check on Eileen, make sure she was okay, and she was in the midst of leaving, to go get a drink, as she felt like she need one or three after tonight. She invited him along, and Sam went with. A drink might be what he needed.

There was a bar up the street that was just the kind of authentically dive-y place that Dean would have loved. Also, Eileen was seemingly the only woman in the place besides the bartender, so they took a back table in hopes that no one paid much attention to them.

Once they had their drinks, she asked, "Is Dean okay?"

Sam nodded. "It's not the first time he's thrown himself in front of a bullet. Or the last, probably." While Sam had gone with a light beer - if he had a regular beer, he would pound them until he was insensate, and he really didn't want Eileen seeing him that way - Eileen had surprised him by getting a bourbon. She said she didn't like American whiskey, but he didn't know if that explained her choice or not.

"Is this how all your cases end up?"

"Completely insane, you mean?"

She smiled at that, but it was kind, not mocking. "Exactly. You seem to drag a slipstream of trouble with you."

Sam shrugged. It was a fair accusation. "We used to joke we were cursed, until it became frightening plausible. Then we stopped." What had once seemed kind of funny just became sad. The story of their life, really. Before all the blood and death, it had been kind of funny.

"Do you think that girl will be okay?"

Sam considered that. "I don't know." It was bad enough her own mother gave her up for a demon vessel, and may have in fact had her for that purpose alone. Vessels ran in families, right? But it's possible that some didn't get quite the same potential as others, or just weren't strong enough to handle Vetis, which is why her four previous siblings "failed". Sam had no idea how much Tansy would remember, but he hoped she never recalled having that slime demon in her. There wasn't enough therapy in the world for some things, and that seemed like a good example.

It also explained what Vetis had been looking for - his one "true" vessel. And it almost found Tansy before her mother did. Sam had no idea what would have happened had that occurred. There would have been a hell of a lot more casualties if that fight took place in downtown Portland.

After a moment of somber reflection, Eileen said, "Hey, what are we so down about? This is a win. I mean, it was as ugly as fuck, but those still count."

That teased a small smile out of Sam. "Yeah, they do."

She raised her glass. "Yaay us. We won. An evil bastard's dead."

Sam clinked his beer bottle against her glass. "I'll drink to that." One down, a million to go.

Oh well. Sam decided that Eileen was right. For tonight, they'd enjoy a victory. Tomorrow could take care of itself.

* * *

 _The End_


End file.
